Blanca and I are speaking at our church in Austin this Sunday. In preparation for what we will share about Sudan, I decided to look up information on the LRA led Christmas massacres we heard about while we were in Yei. Here’s some of what I found in a report compiled by Human Rights Watch. The stories we heard while in Sudan were horrific enough. These leave me shaking and force my mind to take in further depths of human depravity than I’d previously thought possible. Please continue to pray for the safety and healing of the people of the Congo, Uganda, and Sudan and for the redemption of these soldiers along with the coming of justice to these places of unfathomable evil and tremendous suffering.
The LRA were quick at killing. It did not take them very long and they said nothing while they were doing it. They killed all 26. I was horrified. I knew all these people. They were my family, my friends, my neighbors. When they finished I slipped away and went to my home, where I sat trembling all over. — A 72-year-old man who hid in the bushes and watched as the LRA killed his family on Christmas day in Batande, near Doruma. He is one of only a handful of people still alive in his village.
I cry everyday for her. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have your daughter taken from you. It makes me ill when I think about what they [the LRA] could be doing to her in the bush. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again, or even if she’s still alive. — A mother whose 13-year-old daughter was abducted by the LRA in September 2008
In late December 2008 and into January 2009, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) brutally killed more than 865 civilians and abducted at least 160 children in northern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). LRA combatants hacked their victims to death with machetes or axes or crushed their skulls with clubs and heavy sticks. In some of the places where they attacked, few were left alive.
The worst attacks happened in a 48-hour period over Christmas in locations some 160 miles apart in the Doruma, Duru, and Faradje areas of Haut-Uele district of northern Congo. The LRA waited until the time of Christmas festivities on December 24 and 25 to carry out their devastating attacks, apparently choosing a moment when they would find the maximum number of people all together. The killings occurred not just in Congo but also in parts of southern Sudan where similar kinds of weapons and tactics were used.
The Christmas massacres in Congo are part of a longstanding practice of horrific atrocities and abuse by the LRA. Before shifting its operations to the Congo in 2006, the LRA was based in Uganda and southern Sudan where LRA combatants also killed, raped, and abducted thousands of civilians. When the LRA moved to Congo, its combatants initially refrained from targeting Congolese people, but in September 2008 the LRA began its first wave of attacks, apparently to punish local communities who had helped LRA defectors to escape. The first wave of attacks in September, together with the Christmas massacres, has led to the deaths of over 1,033 civilians and the abduction of at least 476 children.
LRA killings have not stopped since the Christmas massacres. Human Rights Watch continues to receive regular reports of murders and abductions by the LRA, keeping civilians living in terror. According to the United Nations, over 140,000 people have fled their homes since late December 2008 to seek safety elsewhere. New attacks and the flight of civilians are reported weekly. In some areas, people are frightened to gather together believing that the LRA may choose such moments to strike, as they did with such devastating efficiency over Christmas.
Even by LRA standards, the Christmas massacres in Congo were especially brutal. LRA combatants struck quickly and quietly, surrounding their victims as they ate their Christmas meal in Batande village, or as they gathered for a Christmas day concert in Faradje. In Mabando village, the LRA sought to maximize the death toll by luring their victims to a central place, playing the radio and forcing their victims to sing songs and to call for others to come join the party. In most of the attacks they tied up their victims, stripped them of their clothes, raped the women and girls, and then killed their victims by crushing their skulls. In two cases the attackers tried to kill three-year-old toddlers by twisting off their heads. The few villagers who survived often did so because their assailants thought they were dead.
The widespread, virtually simultaneous nature of the attacks as well as the similar means used to kill the victims points to a coordinated operation carried out under orders from a single command structure. Captured LRA combatants, interviewed by Human Rights Watch, said that LRA leader Joseph Kony himself ordered attacks on civilians beginning in September 2008, at a time when Kony was still promising to sign the peace accords. An LRA spokesman contacted by Human Rights Watch denied all responsibility for the attacks, saying they had been carried out by Ugandan soldiers pretending to be LRA combatants. Human Rights Watch found no evidence to support this assertion.
